Heil Honey, I’m Home

1,922 words

It aired for only one night in 1990 to an audience of merely a few thousand people on a subscription satellite TV channel that no longer exists before being quickly forgotten, but since being rediscovered in the Internet era, Heil Honey, I’m Home has since achieved a sort of mythic status as one of the most politically incorrect TV show in pop-culture history. It regularly shows up on various “worst/weirdest ever TV moments” lists, with many a baffled commentator pondering how the show ever got made in the first place.

Heil Honey I'm Home (Animated Opening Titles)

Heil Honey, I’m Home was a high-concept comedy show about Hitler and Eva Braun living in an apartment next to their Jewish neighbors, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein, and was performed in the style of 1950s American sitcoms, particularly The Honeymooners. Despite taking place in 1930s Berlin, all the characters speak in 1950s New York accents. Eight episodes were made, but only one was aired before the show was cancelled — although not due to intense public backlash, as some would have you believe. Again, hardly anyone saw it at the time. The show aired on a channel called Galaxy, one of six original channels on short-lived British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), which only ever had 175,000 subscribers. The real reason it was taken off the air is much more mundane: BSB was bought out by competitor Sky Television, which promptly shut down production of all of BSB’s original content in favor of importing American sitcoms.

Does Heil Honey, I’m Home deserve its infamy? I would say no, but you can decide for yourself. The single episode that aired is available on YouTube. It involves British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain coming to Hitler’s apartment to sign the Munich agreement. The meeting is supposed to be secret, but Eva can’t help but brag about it to her gal pal Rosa Goldenstein. The Goldensteins crash the event in hopes of hooking Chamberlain up with Rosa’s frumpy niece.

Heil Honey I'm Home Full Uncut Episode

To me, Heil Honey, I’m Home looks like it was more the product of someone with a deep love of 1950s American sitcoms than someone with something to say about Nazism. If you approach the show expecting a lot of “edgy” humor and ironic racism, you will be disappointed. Likewise, one will be let down if one was expecting a lot of subliminal woke messaging about evil Nazis. But if you approach it as a spoof of 1950s American sitcoms, it’s quite good.

Some say that the problem with it isn’t so much that it was offensive, but that it was unfunny. I disagree. I, for one, was impressed by the extent to which the British actors perfectly nail 1950s American accents. Hitler talking like Jackie Gleason may not be very funny to everyone, but I think it is. Rather than being edgy, Heil Honey, I’m Home is corny — and deliberately so. That’s basically the joke: It’s a corny show about subject matter that you’re only supposed to talk about in super-serious tones.

Another persistent criticism is that the concept might have been enough for a sketch, but not enough for a full series. Perhaps, but we will never know how the show might have progressed had it not been strangled in the crib.

Heil, Honey, I'm Home!

How did a show like this ever get made in the first place? It’s not surprising when you consider the quirks of British culture and history. First, it was obviously made in a less woke time. Schindler’s List hadn’t come out yet, for example. Second, the British have a tradition of transgressive comedy that pushes the boundaries, from Monty Python to Chris Morris and beyond. Third, the British are not as guilt-tripped over the Holocaust as Americans. The United States is famously the country that allegedly stood on the sidelines while the Nazis rampaged across Europe, resulting in the deaths of untold millions. The British, on the other hand, were the country that opposed Hitler from the beginning. The British are thus more comfortable joking about Nazis, because they don’t have as much to feel guilty about. Fourth, it has been a British tradition since the days of the war to portray Hitler as a comical figure, as evidenced by the iconic British war song “Hitler’s Only Got One Ball.”

'Hitler, has only got one ball!' – British WW2 Song

Monty Python – Mr. Hilter

Also worth noting is the fact that the American sitcom Married… with Children was a runaway success at the time, and was one of the first hit shows from then-upstart TV network FOX. It was in some ways revolutionary in that it was possibly the first TV series to become popular because rather than in spite of the fact that it was offensive. The fact that it was in such poor taste was its whole selling point. While people now think of FOX as one of the major networks, in the late 1980s it was seen as a David taking on the Goliaths of NBC, ABC, and CBS that had dominated American television since its origins in the 1940s. As a newcomer, FOX attempted to compensate for its various disadvantages — comparative lack of resources and brand awareness being chief among them — with originality and risk-taking. FOX’s early successes such as Married . . . with Children, 21 Jump Street, America’s Most Wanted, and The Simpsons were, if nothing else, different from anything then airing on the Big Three. Thus, it is understandable that an upstart broadcaster such as BSB would look to FOX for inspiration.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

Heil Honey, I’m Home caused only mild controversy at the time. The Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a fairly tepid boilerplate statement that they were “against any trivialization of the Second World War, Hitler, or the Holocaust, and this certainly trivializes those things. It’s very distasteful.” Heil Honey actually caused more controversy in the United States, where it was not even shown. The Los Angeles Times published no less than three articles kvetching about the show no ordinary American had seen.

The show’s creator, Geoff Atkinson, who wrote for classic British comedies such as Spitting Image and The Two Ronnies, has said that he is asked about this one-episode wonder more than anything else he’s ever done. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Atkinson explained the show’s origins:

I’d been writing comedy a while, and I had two vague ideas that I’d written down for fun at the time. One was this, and the other was Jesus as a 16-year-old, and he’s just been told the truth about what lies in store. [laughs] It was like Beverly Hills 91610 or whatever it is, so they’re all hanging out at the beach, but obviously it’s 2000 years ago, so instead of surfboards, it’s donkeys. [laughs] I just like big, high-concept shows that take a risk. When they work, you can carry them off with a real flair. Paul Jackson went to the channel with the [Heil Honey] pitch, and they said okay. It happened very quickly.

So it looks to me as if the guy wanted to make a show that would ruffle some feathers. While the show seems like an example of simple, absurdist fun, more than 30 years later Atkinson – obviously, given today’s political climate — has to try harder to justify the show’s existence. As he told BBC Culture:

My thinking was, how do you deal with a bully? There’s an argument that it’s equally good to destroy him once and for all by turning him into a joke, and who better to do that than the Jewish couple next door? That was the simple driving force.

 In other interviews, he’s compared the show to comedians lampooning Donald Trump (who, of course, is literally Hitler).

One suspects that BSB anticipated some potential controversy by virtue of the fact that they originally sought two Jews, Caroline Gruber and Gareth Marks, to play Hitler and Eva, but after reading the script, both said that they wanted to play the Jewish couple. As Caroline Gruber told the BBC:

Initially they wanted me to play Eva Braun, but I said, “I don’t want to play her because I’m Jewish, I want to play Rosa.” They said, “But you don’t look Jewish.” I replied, “Well, I may not look it, but I have 2,000 years of persecution running through my veins.” I really liked the premise, but it was important to me that they got Jewish actors to play the Jewish couple.

Thus, they instead cast two gentiles to play Hitler and Eva: Neil McCaul and DeNica Fairman, the latter of whom was replaced after the pilot by the Jewess Maria Friedman. Neil McCaul, who became the lone gentile in the cast after the pilot, no longer speaks about the show after having been burned by journalists over it in the past.

There is an air of mystery about the unaired episodes. The show allegedly changed direction after the pilot, although there are conflicting stories as to how. Rumor has it that the show became more political, with Hitler scheming about various ways to kill the Goldensteins, while the Goldensteins becoming more aware of the precariousness of their situation of living next door to Hitler. We may never know. It is known that the unaired episodes still exist. Geoff Atkinson says he has a copy of them, but will not release them. According to the Lost Media Wiki:

YouTuber Paul Carmichael claimed that he owns second-generation copies of the eight master tapes of the finished episodes. To prove it, he uploaded an unused animated opening sequence as well as VT countdown clocks for the unaired episodes, which also featured episode titles. It is unknown if he will ever upload the episodes themselves, however, as he is apparently waiting for permission from those involved with the show to release them.

Actor Gareth Marks has uploaded a few clips from the unaired episodes that he has used for his professional acting reel, however.

Thankfully, creator Geoff Atkinson has never entirely disavowed his creation. He still maintains that the idea for the show was solid, but laments its execution:

We’d done the pilot, and when we were picked up to series, I had a sense something was not right. There were tensions backstage, and people started questioning [the story], and it became more awkward. People started looking over their shoulders. I mean, it had to be brilliant to win over all the doubters, and there was a sense of mutiny on the ship. It was like flying into a storm. You were playing this game with the audience; you wanted them to dislike it and then like it. Maybe if we had a little longer [to write], we might have looked at things more. God, there are so many ifs and buts to all this, talking this through is like therapy.

Atkinson has said that he is still open to attempting to do the show again:

I’ve certainly never felt embarrassed by it, because I know the motives were good. If we were trying to make fun of what happened in the Holocaust, we’d deserve [the hate]. I never felt we were trying to belittle that at all. But to not get it right, that was frustrating. It was fun, but it came at a price, and I wish I could do it again. If as a result of it [being available online], Netflix phoned and said, “Okay, you can do six more episodes,” I would be the happiest person in the world.